New wave hero Portuguese architect wins UK's most prestigious prize

Álvaro Siza, the Portuguese architect and hero of a new wave of British design talent, was yesterday awarded the Royal Gold Medal, British architecture's most prestigious prize. The 78-year-old is regarded by some as the greatest architect Portugal has ever produced, although his only British building to date has been a temporary pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2006.

His influence on British architects through buildings in Portugal such as the Adega Mayor winery, above, and the Evora housing development, built after the end of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1977, has been far greater.

His style blends modernism's free organisation of spaces with vernacular architecture, so he might use whitewashed stone in Portugal or brick in the Netherlands. That approach has been embraced by a generation of architects including Caruso St John and Tony Fretton, who have rejected the hi-tech movement pioneered by Lord Rogers and Lord Foster and their tendency to use similar components wherever they build in the world.

Siza (below) qualified in 1955 and his architecture matured under the dictatorship in Portugal, which allowed him little exposure to the international modernist style that was emerging across Europe - led in particular by the Swiss architect, Le Corbusier - which was to form the basis of the hi-tech movement.

Siza follows Frank Gehry, Herzog & de Meuron and Frei Otto as recent foreign winners of the prize, which is personally approved by the Queen.

"Álvaro Siza is a profoundly complete architect who defies categorisation," said Sunand Prasad, the president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, which announced the award yesterday. "The forging of a masterful and seemingly inevitable architecture out of the possibilities of a site is one of the supreme characteristics of his work ... This is an architecture in which an economy of expressive means is combined with an abundance of spatial revelation."

Siza continues to design and teach from his base in Porto.

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